Friday, August 9, 2013

Marijuana, Aliens, and Alzheimer’s

Start with Marijuana, and that’s Marijuana the idea, not
marijuana the substance. It’s been illegal in the United States for a long time. It
made its popular culture breakthrough in the 1960’s and was immediately
followed by the Reefer Madness campaign, which caused just about every
self-respecting parent to steer their kids away from it until about 1990. By
this time, a generation passes, and with it the Reefer Madness. Note also that
by this time the anti-marijuana campaign has been absorbed by the larger,
all-purpose, Anti-Drug campaign where it is grouped together with more
dangerous drugs such as cocaine and heroin. In these hospitable conditions, the
Legalize It front comes on strong. Yet, it takes more than twenty years for
marijuana to begin its descent from criminal-maker to decriminalized.

As we look around, in this year 2013, we see that although
the Legalize It force seems to grow stronger, its entire context has shifted.
Not only has the timespan of a generation wiped out the memory of Reefer
Madness, but in other ways, practically unpredictable in the 1990’s, a
resonating reconfiguration of the cultural matrix makes Legalize It almost
obsolete.

The first of these coincidences relates to the
Back-to-Nature movement (the one responsible for beards, backyard chickens and
a resurgence in taxidermy). Part New Age, part WebMD and part Healthcare Reform,
people are ready, willing, and able to use natural drugs to cure their
ailments. It is readily apparent that the Legalize It dialog has changed
drastically, yet somehow imperceptibly according to a general publicpoint-of-view. The dialog is no longer legal-illegal, but
recreational-medicinal. The resolution, the conclusion of the Marijuana Dialog
Proper is foregone, and in its place a less contentious polarization.
Contentious enough, however, to maintain public interest, and related enough to
still be identified as part of the Marijuana Dialog.

The outcome of the dialog will take one of two positions: 1.
It will become legal for medical use, which isn’t exactly “legal” by definition
of the dialog proper, or 2. It will become fully legal, although it will not be
called such, because in order to denote legal status within the new context, it
must be disambiguated, or referred to instead as ‘legal for recreational use’.

This is not, though it may seem, a semantics game, but an
investigation of ideas, and one can’t think about ideas unless they have names,
i.e. semantic identities. Over time, however, it seems that either ideas disown
their identification, or they never existed in the first place. There are more
subtle adjustments in the way an idea, or a debate play out over time. These
could be called exogenous because they come from a space close-to but
outside-of the dialog proper. They have an effect nonetheless on how we engage
in the debate, and it is because of their exogenous quality that we often
neglect their impact.

Enter, separately, Prescription Drugs and Synthetic Drugs.
Today, doctors are being investigated for writing painkiller prescriptions
illegally – behaving as drug dealers essentially. All this in light of a
statewide drug investigation in New Jersey, due to a marked increase in drug
use – prescription drugs, that is, especially the ones analogous to heroin,
since that makes it part of the larger drug culture as it is understood.
Compared to this portent of pharmaceutical remedies and abuses (what could be
considered part of the separate Big Pharma Dialog), marijuana seems benign.

Synthetic THC was sort-of legal for about one year, and not
because law enforcement was unaware of it, but because the substance didn't fit
under the law – it’s not THC, but the law says “THC”, not “THC-like”, not even
one that is so -like that it has only one molecule out of place. Yet, this substance, which was legal by default was sending kids to the hospital, or at
least into temporary psychosis, something real, regular THC is not likely to
do. If our law can’t keep up with the synthetic drugs, and they are much more
damaging than their natural illegal counterparts, why not just make it legal.
At this point, another thread of the dialog proper has been frayed and twisted
away.

Debates such as this are never fully resolved; they are
instead absorbed into the larger cultural matrix, rendered asunder, and redistributed
until they can barely be recognized. I do not mean to discount human agency,
but to change the way in which we engage with the Dialog, and more importantly,
with how we think about the Dialog. At least we must question whether or not we
are wasting time and energy articulating dialogs which no longer exist with us.

Google Earth Glitch Art Gallery

Moving on, to higher
ground: Aliens

The Aliens Dialog seems fairly simple – do they exist, or do
they not. The very concept as we know it today comes from (believe it or not)
turn-of-the-century science fiction, which by the 1930’s evolved into the
little green men of Welles’ Wells’ War of the Worlds. Ever since, Aliens have been a convenient answer to many of the
world’s unsolved mysteries, as well as a source of highly imaginative fantasy.
Anyone with an active imagination speculates on the day when we have some
in-your-face evidence on the existence of aliens. But, as it turns out, our
imagination is apparently no match for the possible expressions of the Aliens
Dialog that science has been throwing our way.

What is this; life has been found in a lake, timecapsuled under four miles of ice, experiencing pressures and temperatures that are more
Europa-like than Earth. What say you now, Aliens? And this; molecules capable
of creating life-building amino acids can themselves be created in a comet in
outer-space-like conditions. Or this; exoplanets by the week. Or this; by
reverse engineering the rate of acceleration of genetic complexification, the
zero-point of origin comes out at 9 billion years, five more than Earth’s
existence. And let’s not forget synthetic life. And finally, in developing
biosignatures for use in space exploration, some things are forcing us to
seriously rethink what life is: Apparently, all that is needed to be called
“life” is a particular frequency distribution of essential amino acids. Unless,
of course, you would rather import the topics of artificial intelligence and
algorithmic automation into the debate, in which case you would be forced to
consider their processes of competition, cooperation and evolution that seem to
emulate what we might call life.

At this point, the Aliens Dialog has become so faceted and
nuanced that by the time we can answer the yes-no question, it won’t even exist
with us. All of the above examples are exogenous in that they have come not from within the Aliens Dialog, but
from completely unsolicited, relatively unrelated dialogs of their own. The
search for exoplanets isn’t looking for aliens, per se, but only Earth-like places in our galaxy. Biosignatures are
not to help us discover aliens, but only to expand our definition of what life
is, so that we can refine our technical recourse. None of these things help or
hinder the resolution of the Aliens debate. What they certainly do, is to
distort, to obfuscate the dialog until it settles into a cold, moot state in
the memories of a generation that once cared about its outcome. There is no
outcome.

Google Earth Glitch Art Gallery

Finally, closer to
home: The Body Dialog

It’s really not a dialog as of yet, except for hardcore
cyberpunk enthusiasts, blue sky research groups, and anyone working with neural
interface systems. But it’s coming, inevitably, and here we will, despite its
mind-bogglingly ostentatious preposterousness, attempt to predict its eventual
disappearance into ubiquity.

The Body dialog, being that it isn’t fully formed yet, goes
something like this: Your body determines who you are to the extent that it has
a physical existence which can be located and analyzed objectively, that is to
say, consensually. But you are more than just your body; this “more” is your
mind. The Mind is non-physical, which makes it harder for people to agree on
what it is, where it is, etc. Because we can’t objectively observe, via the
hard sciences, the nature of the Mind, any theory of self which incorporates the
mind becomes non-falsifiable. This disrupts the intuitive notion that self
should be determined by the body at all. Hence, the Body Dialog: Can we
continue to exist as individuals without a body to serve as locus for the self?

Advances in neural interfaces, in all manner of prostheses,
in any cognitive studies, in machine learning, and in neuroscience in general;
are amassing into this meme-set we call here the Body Dialog (conditioned by the
more public discourse on virtual identity and digital existence).

To what extent is our self determined by our body, and to
what extent can we remove our selves form our bodies while still remaining ourself? It sounds preposterous, as it
tends to be at first. Then comes the contentious phase. We are slowly entering
that now, in 2013, and will be in full swing within the decade’s end. By 2050,
the Body Dialog will no longer exist, and yet some chimerical form of it will
keep the illusion continuous for some time after.

We can see its bifurcation from the dialog proper, because
it’s already among us: Alzheimer’s is sad, there is no doubt. It dismantles your
brain, module by module, if you will, until it becomes questionable as to whether
you are still you. The wave of psychological disorders which is slated for the
coming generation of aging Americans announces the beginning of a shift in the
entire context of the Body Dialog. As a generation interacts with the mental
deterioration of their elderly, the concept of self, in relation to the body,
becomes so fuzzy that the envelope we use to separate life from death becomes
less rigid, and as the means to manipulate it become more accessible, so grows
our willingness to use it.

-A new scientific
truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the
light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation
grows up that is familiar with it.

-Max Plank, Scientific
Autobiography, p151

Google Earth Glitch Art Gallery

RATIONALE

Ideas change over time, making it difficult to maintain
meaningful dialog about popular issues. This disguised metamorphosis, an
ontological distortion, seems to happen to
the idea itself, but it is better understood as a massive reconfiguration of
the entire idea-space.

-The paradigm shift
does not change the world …it changes the scientist. (Thomas Kuhn, 1962, p121)

In some instances it becomes readily apparent that it is not
the idea itself that remains constant. The idea only exists as a product of the
network in which it is embedded. Its entire identification is an illusion,
required by consciousness: for how could we debate and discuss, support and
deny, prove and disprove an idea throughout time if we didn’t give it a sturdy,
solid form?

-Just because it did
not involve the introduction of additional objects or concepts, the transition
from Newtonian to Einsteinian mechanics illustrates with particular clarity,
the scientific revolution as a displacement of the conceptual network through
which scientists view the world. (p102)

Newsworthy topics of our time can serve as an example. When
we talk about a popular subject, such as marijuana use, we address it as a
dialog. In the beginning, when the dialog is “hot”, it polarizes, or in a more
imaginative way, it superimposes on two possible expressions. But as the dialog
cools down, it bifurcates, seeking out slightly less contentious alternatives
for expression.

-Problems are anticipated
well in advance, so they come as less of a surprise, until they start to come
from everywhere; then you have a crisis, and then paradigm shift, and it doesn’t
happen until it has to. (~p75)

The Dialog, clear and guttural at first, becomes nothing but
a thousand whispers. At this point, though the Dialog is still unresolved in
the explicit sense, its superpositions have all collapsed unnoticeably into
benign ubiquity; homeostasis.

Google Earth Glitch Art Gallery

But there is more to the story than thermal equilibrium
analogies. Enter the illusion of memetic transmutation. In these so-called Dialogs,
two opposing memetic configurations use the same meme-sets but articulate them
differently, thus altering their meaning. Both sides of the Marijuana Dialog
Proper, for example, use the same memotypes of the mental world, of
self-control (or lack thereof), of exploration (and its dangers) but they
impart different ~emotional values to each, in a collaboration that makes both
sides distinct.

-Since new paradigms
are born from old ones, they ordinarily incorporate much of the vocabulary and
apparatus…. …Within the new paradigm, old terms, concepts, and experiments fall
into new relationships one with the other.” (p149)

Over time, it is not the dialog that changes, per se, it is the opposing
configurations that create its distinct expressions, for they become mixed and
mangled so thoroughly with outside memes, side conversations and surprises,
that even the means by which we might address them will have vanished.

-Although the
strategies and techniques may remain the same, it is the world itself which has
changed. (p111)

The opposing sides of the dialog are reconfigured to be
accessible to the largest number of belief constructs available. Different configurations
will be more easily accepted by different people, who all use different belief
constructs to filter, organize and engage with the dialog.

It is in these kinds of value modifiers within the different
configurations, or narrative cues as we might call them, where the interest
lies. The two opposing views on marijuana use may be using the same meme-sets
to an extent. But each view has a subset of modifiers whose job it is not to
inform content, but to adjust emotional response.

In time, as the Dialog cools down, these seemingly unimportant
value modifiers are exposed and become quasi expressions of the Dialog Proper,
a distraction, an obfuscation. When enough value modifiers are exploited, the
Dialog Proper ceases to exist with us.

-There is never any
single argument that can or should persuade them all. Rather than a single
group conversion, what occurs is an increasing shift in the distribution of
professional allegiances. (p158)

Yet , we may continue to engage in the Dialog, not fully
realizing its absorption into the cultural vortex; that which feeds on our
contentious debates today, and tomorrow spits out predictive discoveries,
benign policy stipulations, and pop-music lyrics.

Google Earth Glitch Art Gallery

AN AFTERWORD

In 1962, Thomas Kuhn wrote Structures of Scientific
Revolution, wherein he surveyed the paradigm shifts that occur in the
scientific discipline: A complex process, no doubt. Though Kuhn’s Structures deals specifically with
Science, there are to be found in his work prescient thoughts as they relate to
the coding, transmission and distortion of ideas by the general public. The
same expressions, explanations, descriptions and observations presented by Kuhn
in the arena of Science, remain useful still in the greater mess of the public
psyche.

About Me

First things first, that's not a picture of me, although it could be any one of us. It's a painting by Alex Grey.
Next, the blog Limbic Signal is an extension of my book Hidden Scents, and the blog Network Address is a personal archive that I like to keep online for easy access.
Last, I'm a thirty-something male from Suburbia, New Jersey, a high school visual arts instructor, independent researcher, and writer.
Hidden Scents The Language of Smell in the Age of Approximation is my first attempt at authoring a work of non-fiction, and serves as a response to the dearth of information on the topic of Smell.